Carrier Aggregated Radio-Over-Fiber Downlink for Achieving 2Gbps for 5G Applications

We demonstrate experimentally, for the first time, a distributed digital predistortion model for radio-over-fiber (RoF) downlink suitable for broadband 5G signals. The model reduces the analog-to-digital converter sampling frequency up to 1/3 of the required sampling in the example of the conventional memory polynomial DPD model, hence reducing demodulator costs and hardware complexity. This model also provides better intercarrier interference by reducing the adjacent channel leakage ratio (ACLR). This leads to reduced crosstalk, which impacts the multi-core and multimode RoF links. Long-term evolution advanced signals of a 256-quadratic-amplitude modulation of different bandwidths are used to validate the model. We achieved an average reduction of 2.5 dB in ACLR for signal bandwidths in the range 100–300 MHz while maintaining minimum error vector magnitude (EVM). The RoF downlink can deliver a peak bit rate of 2.016 Gb/s with a spectral efficiency of 6.72 b/Hz and EVM less than 4%.